Artificial enzymes suggest life doesn't need DNA or RNA

• Researchers have developed artificial enzymes from genetic material that does not exist in nature, called XNA, an advance that hints at the possibility that life could evolve without DNA or RNA.
  DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid and ribonucleic acid or RNA are two self-replicating molecules considered indispensable for life on Earth.
  "Our work with XNA shows that there's no fundamental imperative for RNA and DNA to be prerequisites for life," said Philipp Holliger of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.
  XNA or xeno nucleic acid created by Holliger's team contains the same bases - adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine and uracil - on which DNA and RNA rely for coding hereditary information, 'New Scientist' reported.
  In DNA and RNA, the sugars are deoxyribose and ribose, respectively. Holliger made new types of genetic material by replacing these with different sugars or other molecules.
  In the new study, researchers showed that XNAs can also serve as enzymes - indispensable catalysts for speeding up chemical reactions vital for life.
  One of the first steps towards life on Earth is thought to be the evolution of RNA into self-copying enzymes.
  The XNA enzymes can't yet copy themselves but they can cut and paste RNA, just like natural enzymes do, and even paste together fragments of XNA.
  Holliger said that RNA and DNA may have come to dominate Earth by chance, simply because they were the best evolutionary materials to hand.
  "You could speculate that on other planets, XNAs would dominate instead," he said.

First ‘green diesel’-powered flight

A Boeing aircraft has completed the world’s first flight using ‘green diesel’, a sustainable biofuel made from vegetable oils, waste cooking oil and animal fats.

The company powered its ecoDemonstrator 787 flight test airplane on December 2 with a blend of 15 per cent green diesel and 85 per cent petroleum jet fuel in the left engine.

“Green diesel offers a tremendous opportunity to make sustainable aviation biofuel more available and more affordable for our customers,” said Julie Felgar, managing director of Environmental Strategy and Integration, Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

“We will provide data from several ecoDemonstrator flights to support efforts to approve this fuel for commercial aviation and help meet our industry’s environmental goals,” Ms. Felgar said in a statement.

Sustainable green diesel is widely available and used in ground transportation. Boeing previously found that this fuel is chemically similar to HEFA (hydro-processed esters and fatty acids) aviation biofuel approved in 2011.

Widely available

Green diesel is chemically distinct and a different fuel product than “biodiesel,” which also is used in ground transportation.

With production capacity of 800 million gallons (three billion litres) in the U.S., Europe and Asia, green diesel could rapidly supply as much as one per cent of global jet fuel demand.

“The airplane performed as designed with the green diesel blend, just as it does with conventional jet fuel,” said Captain Mike Carriker, Chief Pilot for New Airplane Product Development, Boeing Test and Evaluation.

On a lifecycle basis, sustainably produced green diesel reduces carbon emissions by 50 to 90 per cent compared to fossil fuel, according to Finland-based Neste Oil, which supplied green diesel for the ecoDemonstrator 787.

The flight test was coordinated with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney, and EPIC Aviation blended the fuel.

Being middle class in India

Are differences within the middle class, in income, education, and cultural and social capital, so wide as to render moot any ideological or behavioural coherence to this group?

Over the next two months, The Hindu will release the findings of a new survey on the aspirations and anxieties of ordinary Indians. The survey is the latest round of a multi-year panel study sponsored by the Lok Foundation and carried out in collaboration with the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania, in conjunction with the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. The “Lok Surveys” aim to track the attitudes of Indians over the next several years, as part of a significant new effort to understand the social and political reconfigurations taking place across Indiatoday. CMIE, on behalf of the Lok Foundation, conducted face-to-face interviews of 69,920 randomly selected Indians across 25 states and union territories between January and May 2014. Because our sample is about two-thirds urban and one-third rural, 2011 Census data is used to reweight the sample to ensure urban/rural representativeness.

The rapid growth of the Indian economy over the past three decades has led to a substantial expansion of India’s “middle class”. This has triggered a robust debate over who in India actually belongs to the “middle class,” its size, composition, and political and social behaviour. This is a debate with serious implications for economic growth and governance since a range of scholarship in diverse settings has shown that the middle class is an important driver of a country’s economic, political and social development.

But is the middle class anything more than simply a large group whose income makes it neither rich nor poor? Are differences within the middle class, especially in income, education and cultural and social capital, so wide as to render moot any ideological or behavioural coherence to this group?

This also happens to be a debate with no easy answers because social class is a conceptually complex measure; there is neither a universally accepted definition of middle class nor widely available data on the income of Indian households, as opposed to their consumption patterns. But even if acceptable measures and hard data could be marshalled, they would still be ill-equipped to nail down a rather elusive concept: whether Indians actually believe and behave as if they are part of the middle class. Self-identification of class status is important because it suggests the possibility that Indians may behave in ways that are actually at odds with material realities.

To investigate this, the latest Lok survey asked respondents from across the country whether they considered their family to be a “middle class” family.

To our surprise, nearly half (49 per cent) of all survey respondents believed their family is a middle class family. There was, as one would expect, great variation in responses across states. For instance, while 68 per cent of respondents in Karnataka believed their family belonged to the middle class, just 29 per cent of respondents in Madhya Pradesh felt the same. Self-identification as middle class is expectedly more prevalent among urban respondents (56 per cent) but the share of rural individuals claiming to be middle class is also remarkably high (46 per cent).

Survey results

Two things are striking about this finding: the contrast between respondents’ self-perception and objective reality and differences on the rural-urban axis (Figure 1). We disaggregated our sample into five income categories, based on self-reported annual household income. While any such classification is admittedly blunt, the results are nonetheless illustrative. Whereas respondents are more likely to self-identify as middle class as household income increases, a sizeable proportion of respondents across all income groups believe they are part of the Indian middle class. 47 per cent of lower middle-income respondents self-identified as “middle class”, while half of middle income and 54 per cent of upper middle-income respondents did so. Expectedly this declined to 48 per cent for those in the highest income bracket. Most surprising 45 per cent of those who were in the lowest income bracket self-identify as middle class, barely 3 per cent less than the richest income group.

Even within the same income categories, however, there are marked differences between rural and urban India. There could be several reasons for this. For one, we are comparing nominal incomes and not real incomes, given the much higher cost of living in urban areas. Second—and this reflects disagreements about whether a coherent middle-class identity comes about due to social or economic factors or is instead the result of political factors—ascriptive identities (especially caste) are more salient in rural relative to urban India. Historically, the “middle class” construct has been a production of the forces of industrialisation and urbanisation.

Middle class belonging also increases with educational attainment: the more educated one is, the more likely she is to claim to be middle class. However, 47 per cent of individuals with less than 10th standard education—those we typically do not associate with middle class status—still claim such an affiliation. Those numbers are surprisingly large and, as with income, urban-rural differences are notable.

But the extent of “middle class” identification is striking, not simply because of its size or the fact that it seems to run counter to households’ own economic realities, but also because it appears to have powerful experiential effects on respondents’ social attitudes.

Across a range of measures, those who believe they are middle class are markedly more upbeat about their status in life today as well as their prospects in the future (Figure 2). When asked whether they believed their household’s economic conditions are getting better, 62 per cent of self-proclaimed “middle class” respondents answered in the affirmative, compared to 48 per cent for those who feel they are not among the middle class. When compared to those who believe they are not middle class, larger proportions of so-called “middle class” respondents believed that their children will have a higher standard of living than they enjoy and that their family’s social status has improved in a generation. Furthermore, they are more bullish in their assessments of the country’s overall progress and India’s economic conditions as a whole.

Class replacing caste?

The factors driving such large middle class self-identification are less clear. In a status conscious society, as caste weakens as a marker of status, could this be a sign that class markers are taking its place? What might be some consequences of self-identifying as middle class? Could it be, for instance, a factor shaping occupational mismatches between aspirations and jobs in Indian labour markets as one of us has shown in a related work (Aggarwal, Kapur, et al, 2012)? If so, it could explain the fact that in fast growing urban areas where there is a large unmet demand for good blue-collar skills (such as carpenters or plumbers), which can give incomes that would place the person in the lower middle class, young people often prefer a lower paying “white-collar” job as a shop assistant.

The “middle class” moniker may also be affecting what people do with their money and how they define their roles in society. There is considerable evidence that, to the extent class reflects a person’s place in society; it impacts both consumption levels and product choices. Our finding that middle class self-perception makes one more optimistic about the economy bodes well for consumer spending since the extent to which people are sanguine about their economic future influences their discretionary spending.

Another contested terrain shaped by social class is political behaviour. The Lok survey indicates that, for all the talk of “middle class” support for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the evidence is not clear-cut. Self-proclaimed middle class Indians were only marginally more likely to have voted for the BJP in the recent general election. We find starker differences when measuring class objectively through income, education, or occupational criteria — with those on the upper ends of the spectrum (those with at least a 10th standard education, a “bourgeoisie” occupation, or with annual household income above Rs.7,20,000) more in favour of the BJP.

Three structural changes occurring in India — service-sector led economic growth, rapid expansion of urbanisation and higher education — are undoubtedly resulting in a massive expansion of the middle class, however defined. The political and social consequences will depend on whether this middle class emerges simply as a social formation or as a self-conscious political force, whether progressive or possibly even reactionary.

Modi wins TIME readers’ poll for ‘Person of the Year’

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who did not make it to the final eight selected byTIME for the annual ‘Person of the Year’ title, has been hailed as one by its readers in an online poll conducted by the publication.

Mr. Modi has been named winner of this year’s readers’ poll for TIME ‘Person of the Year’, securing more than 16 per cent of the almost five million votes cast.

Protesters in Ferguson, who were demonstrating against a grand jury’s decision not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson who shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in August ranked second with 9 per cent of the votes. TIME said “a strong showing of readers from India” helped drive Mr. Modi’s first-place finish.

“More people from the country voted than from any other country, with the exception of the United States,” it said. Readers from more than 225 countries participated in the online poll, with U.S. votes leading the tally at 37 per cent, followed by India at 17 per cent, and Russia at 12 per cent.

TIME said Mr. Modi became Prime Minister in May after securing a landslide victory on a “platform of rebooting India’s stalling economy”. “But his detractors have questioned his past record,” it added.

Hong Kong protest leader Joshua Wong, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Malala Yousafzai and the doctors and nurses treating Ebola rounded out the top five. A majority of votes, 60 per cent, came from desktop computers. Just over 35 per cent came from mobile devices, and 4.5 per cent of readers voted on tablets.

Mr. Modi, who “entered office this year on the promise of reviving the country’s economy”, however has not made it to the list of eight finalists shortlisted by TIME editors for the 2014 Person of the Year title, which will be announced on Wednesday. Names of the eight finalists were announced by TIMEeditor Nancy Gibbs today.

Making it to the final eight are founder and CEO of the Alibaba Group Jack Ma, Apple CEO Tim Cook, pop star Taylor Swift, Ferguson protestors, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ebola caregivers, National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell and President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq Masoud Barzani.

The annual honour, that has been bestowed by the magazine since 1927, goes to the person who “most influenced the news” during the year “for better or worse”. Mr. Modi was among the 50 global leaders, business chiefs and pop icons named as contenders for the annual honour.

In a separate “Face-off” poll, Mr. Modi had been pitted against Indonesia’s new president Joko Widodo. In this poll too, Mr. Modi maintained a significant lead and garnered 69 per cent votes in his favour as against Mr. Widodo’s 31 per cent.

New satellite takes wing

India has a new bird in the sky — the communication satellite GSAT-16 that was successfully launched aboard Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket in the early hours of Sunday. GSAT-16 has 48 transponders, the largest number thus far on a communication satellite built by the Indian Space Research Organisation. It will join a constellation of 10 satellites that form the Indian National Satellite (INSAT) system. Its transponders, operating in various frequency bands, will provide much-needed augmentation of the existing 188 transponders on the INSAT system that broadcast television programmes, provide educational and tele-medicine services, carry telephone conversations, and relay data. In addition, close to 95 transponders have been leased on foreign satellites, principally to meet the needs of Direct-To-Home (DTH) television channels. Vikram Sarabhai, who founded the country’s space programme, had the farsightedness in the 1960s itself to recognise how important communication satellites and the services they provide would be to a developing nation. It was a vision that his successors turned into reality, with the first of the indigenously-built INSAT satellites being launched in July 1992.

After the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) became available in the mid-1990s, the country has not had to look abroad to launch its remote sensing satellites. That transition has yet to happen with communication satellites. The current Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) has hitherto been trouble-prone, and the version equipped with an indigenous cryogenic stage replacing an imported Russian one made its first successful flight only in January this year. Even if the GSLV becomes a reliable launcher like the PSLV, it can only carry communication satellites weighing up to about 2.2 tonnes. ISRO has already launched considerably heavier communication satellites on the Ariane 5, including the GSAT-16 that weighs close to 3.2 tonnes. Launching these satellites abroad is expensive. The price tag for the GSAT-16 comes to about Rs.900 crore. Of this, the foreign launch costs come to around Rs.560 crore — not including insurance. Had the next-generation GSLV Mark III, which can take four-tonne communication satellites, been operational, that launch might have cost only about half as much. But the cryogenic engine for the upper stage of the Mark III is still being developed. The rocket’s first experimental launch, scheduled for later this month, will therefore be a suborbital one to test its flight characteristics through the atmosphere. ISRO expects to have the Mark III’s cryogenic engine and stage ready in two years’ time. The sooner that happens, the better.

Steps taken to Accelerate the Pace of Reduction for MMR Under National Health Mission (NHM)

As per the latest report of the Registrar General of India, Sample Registration System (RGI-SRS), Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) of India is 178 per 100,000 live births for the period 2010-12. This translates into an approximate number of 47,100 deaths per year for India. Establishing assured referral transport between the community and health facilities is important for addressing delay in reaching the health facility and timely care during any obstetric complications. Reproductive health services under the overall umbrella of the National Health Mission are provided free at all Government Health Services through a continuum of care approach of Reproductive, Maternal, New Born, Child Health and Adolescent (RMNCH+A) Health. It is a fact that some of the Government hospitals constructed much earlier have maternity and children ward located at different places. Under National Health Mission (NHM), the key steps taken by Government of India to address the above concerns and also to accelerate the pace of reduction for Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) are:  Promotion of institutional deliveries through Janani Suraksha Yojana.  Janani Shishu Suraksha Karyakaram (JSSK) has been launched on 1st June, 2011, which entitles all pregnant women delivering in public health institutions to absolutely free and no expense delivery including Caesarean section. The initiative stipulates free drugs, diagnostics, blood and diet, besides free transport from home to institution, between facilities in case of a referral and drop back home. Similar entitlements have been put in place for all sick infants accessing public health institutions for treatment.  184 High Priority Districts (HPDs) have been identified and prioritized for Reproductive, Maternal, New Born, Child Health and Adolescent (RMNCH+A) interventions for achieving improved maternal and child health outcomes  Capacity building of health care providers in basic and comprehensive obstetric care.  Operationalization of sub-centres, Primary Health Centres, Community Health Centres and District Hospitals for providing 24x7 basic and comprehensive obstetric care services.  To tackle the high bed occupancy in the maternity wards, Mother & Child Health Wings have been sanctioned at high case load facilities where the maternity and children ward are together for provision of continuum of care approach to pregnant women, newborns and children.  Name Based Web enabled Tracking of Pregnant Women to ensure antenatal, intranatal and postnatal care.  Mother and Child Protection Card in collaboration with the Ministry of Women and Child Development to monitor service delivery for mothers and children.  Antenatal, Intranatal and Postnatal care including Iron and Folic Acid supplementation to pregnant & lactating women for prevention and treatment of anaemia.  Engagement of more than 8.9 lakhs Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) to generate demand and facilitate accessing of health care services by the community.  Referral systems have been established including emergency referral transport for pregnant women, for which the states have been given flexibility to use different models.  Village Health and Nutrition Days in rural areas as an outreach activity, for provision of maternal and child health services.  Health and nutrition education to promote dietary diversification, inclusion of iron and folate rich food as well as food items that promote iron absorption.

Effective Implementation of Healthcare Delivery Schemes

In March 2012, the Cabinet, inter-alia, approved continuation of National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) for a period of five years, from 01.04.2012 to 31.03.2017 (i.e. co-terminus with the 12th Five Year Plan). Currently, NRHM is a Sub- Mission of National Health Mission (NHM) with National Urban Health Mission (NUHM) being the other Sub-Mission. Government of India had adopted a strategy of co-location of AYUSH facilities at Primary Health Centres (PHCs), Community Health Centres (CHCs) and District Hospitals (DHs), thus enabling choice for different systems of medicine from a single platform. As of now, 15726 AYUSH facilities are co-located at various healthcare facilities including PHCs, CHCs and Districts Hospitals. 21361 AYUSH doctors and 6289 AYUSH paramedics are engaged under NRHM. Necessary support for training, drugs & equipment, IEC etc. is provided under the NRHM and National Ayush Mission. ASHA is the first port of call in the community especially for marginalized sections of the population, with a focus on women and children. The majority of states have in place an active training and support system for the ASHA to ensure continuing training, on site field mentoring, and performance monitoring. More than 8.96 lakh ASHAs are in place across the country and serve as facilitators, mobilizers and providers of community level care. The Government of India is committed to reduce the high Out of Pocket (OOP) expenditure inter-alia by providing free drugs in public health facilities. Government of India introduced an incentive to the extent of 5 % of the state’s Resource Envelope under NHM for those states that implement free essential drugs scheme for all patients accessing public health facilities. Further, substantial funding for free drugs is being provided to states that implement the National Health Mission - Free Drug Service Initiative. Mobile Medical Units (MMUs) are used to provide primary healthcare services in hard to reach areas. To increase visibility, awareness and accountability, all MMUs supported under the NHM have been repositioned as “National Mobile Medical Unit” with universal design.